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Brute Force attack

A type of attack in which every possible key is attempted until the correct key is found. Ciphertext is deciphered under different keys until recognizable plaintext is discovered. On average, this will take half as many attempts as there are keys in the keyspace.

“To crack a 64-bit key, it would take 10 EFF DES Crackers operating for an entire year. At 128 bits, it is totally infeasible to break a key by brute force, even if all the computers in the world are put to the task. To break one in a year would require, say, 1 trillion computers (more than 100 computers for every person on the globe), each running 10 billion times faster than the EFF DES Cracker. Put another way, it would require the equivalent of 10 billion trillion DES Crackers!”
Hiding Crimes in Cyberspace, Dorothy E. Denning and William E. Baugh, Jr. July 1999.

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